How to Get Ahead During the Covid-19 “Crisis”

Chris Albert 00:00:00 (link to this point)

The Warrior Soul Podcast is written, edited, and produced by me, Albert. Our mission is to provide tools, tactics, strategies, and ideas that help The US military veteran community to show up as the wisest, strongest, most capable versions of themselves in the civilian world. If you're not a veteran, stick around because anything we talk about will most certainly apply to you as well. This podcast is made possible with the help of F Bomb Nutrition. They make delicious packets of fats that you can carry around anywhere with you in little portable packets.

They make macadamia nut butters. They mix them up with chocolate. They mix them up with sea salt. They mix them up with coconut butter. They're absolutely delicious, and they're really good for you.

They don't have any sugar. They also make a lot of cheese snacks. They make meat sticks, and it's just a great company. These guys send packages of this stuff to the troops who are on the front lines overseas to supplement their MREs, and we didn't ask them to do that. They just did that on their own initiative. Really great company. If you wanna get 20% off your first order of f bombs, head over to www.dropanfbomb.com and use the code Warrior Soul at checkout. This podcast is also brought to you with the help of Save the Brave.

Savethebrave.org is a five zero one c three charity for veterans. They run camaraderie events that include fishing, golfing. They also do a lot of work with gold star families. And unlike a lot of other organizations, their board doesn't take a salary. Really great organization that is doing amazing work.

So go and check them out at savethebrave.org. With that, thank you guys so much. Let's get into today's programming.

What is going on, ladies and gentlemen? Welcome to the Warrior Soul podcast. My name is Chris Albert, and this is where we deliver tools, tactics, strategies and ideas to you each week to help The US military veteran community to show up as wiser, stronger, more capable human beings in the civilian world. And if you're not a veteran stick around because obviously anything I talk about here will apply to anybody. Huge things going on here at the Warrior Soul Podcast.

We've got some amazing guests. We've just had on some amazing guests as well. I just interviewed Mike Ritland, the Navy SEAL and world famous dog trainer and dog handler. Really awesome guy. Really enjoyed speaking with him.

I also interviewed Baktash Ahadi, who is a former interpreter, for the United States military in Afghanistan, and we had an excellent conversation. Make sure you guys check out those episodes. And this week, we had on Gary John Bishop, the author of Un Fuck Yourself and Stop Doing That Shit. Two really great books that I really appreciated. He is an awesome dude, full of knowledge about how we tend to sabotage ourselves through our own subconscious and through our own actions.

So you'll definitely want to check those episodes out. Today I want to talk to you about current events. I mean, now I am recording this on Friday the thirteenth, 03/13/2020, and the world seems to have gone a little bit crazy because of COVID nineteen, the coronavirus. And I just traveled this week, was in Fort Lauderdale on business, I have a day job, had to go down there and do some things with the company I'm working with. And then flying around you know you see people they're in masks, they're carrying around hand sanitizer and then you turn on the news and it seems like the world's coming in right now.

People are rushing into grocery stores, they're buying up supplies, they're stocking up on toilet paper, toilet paper Which kind of boggles my mind because I'm not understanding how they think there's going to be a shortage of toilet paper when the virus doesn't cause diarrhea. I get, you know, maybe they think we're all going to be holed up in a bunker somewhere, and who knows by the time you get this, but by the time you guys get this podcast, which will be about a week later, maybe we will be holed up in bunkers. Maybe it is that serious. I don't know. But what I do know is this human beings are not entirely rational.

We try to make decisions in a rational format. We try to call ourselves rational. But as evidenced by this and as evidenced by the fact that the stock market has plunged to ridiculous lows in at a time when all the fundamentals are strong, I can't put this up to anything else besides human irrationality and human fear. So what I want to talk to you about today is how to deal with an irrational society. What does it mean for you?

What does it mean for all of us? Those of us who are sitting here right now and saying, well, what the hell? Why are people acting this way? And I wanna talk to you about some of the ways that you can come out of this a winner. Right?

And and I know there's a lot of people right now, you know, that you can't watch sporting events, sports are are are not gonna be on TV. You can't go out right now because a lot of places are closed. It might come down to the fact that, you know, maybe maybe certain maybe more things are gonna get closed off. Right? So how do you use this?

How do you use this to move yourself forward? And I'm gonna go through a couple of, you know, just basic things that you could be doing right now to get yourself ahead during this time. Now, one thing I wanna say is this, because it might have come out wrong. I was just listening to myself right now, and this might come out the wrong way. I am not telling you to take advantage of people.

I'm not telling you to be dishonest. What I'm telling you is that in chaos, there are always opportunities. Always opportunities to learn, always opportunities to grow, and always opportunities to gain. And the first one is this, and this is something that I alluded to earlier in this talk. And it's the fact that stock market went down to record lows over the last week.

Now if you've been reading and here's the deal, I I highly recommend you read the books that I'm gonna talk about here. And I say this because I am not a financial expert.

I'm not somebody you should listen to for investment advice. I am not somebody you should take stock tips from or anything like that. But I've been doing a significant amount of reading about finance over the last year, mainly because I didn't know much about it. And what I learned during that time was that time to buy stocks, the time to get into the market, the time to invest your retirement plans is when the stock market is down and particularly when it's down for irrational reasons. Before I get into the reasons why, I wanna talk about the books that I read that you guys should check out.

The first one is one called The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. This one's a little bit hefty on the intellectual side. Benjamin Graham was a professor. He was somebody who taught Warren Buffett when Warren Buffett was in college, and he basically came up with the idea of dollar cost averaging. Putting a set amount of money into the stock market at, you know, regular intervals.

Every month, putting a set amount of money and averaging yourself into positions. And when I say averaging yourself into positions, what I mean is that the stock market as you're doing that, it's gonna go up, it's gonna go down. Essentially what you're gonna do is if you're putting a set amount of money each month into the stock market, you're averaging your way into positions in the market. Now I suggest you read that book because it goes through a lot of the basic logic behind, you know, just being an intelligent investor. But I also recommend you read a book called The Millionaire Teacher.

That book is by Andrew Hallam, and it is a fantastic book because it breaks things down very very simply. The author Andrew Hallam, he was a teacher. He was making $40,000 a year and he managed to become a millionaire through really basic investment strategies. None of these are like get rich quick things. He talks about dollar cost averaging.

He talks about investing in low fee index funds. And he talks about the types of funds and and what you should consider getting yourself into. There's a whole lot of knowledge in that book and I highly recommend it. And then the third book I recommend that you check out is A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel. And the reason why I like that book is because it will educate you against all of these different people who will claim that you can play the market.

Right? You're you shouldn't be looking to play the market. You shouldn't be looking to speculate or anything like that because you can lose money that way really, really easily. It's pretty much gambling. But Burton Malkiel talks about the fact that a group of monkeys throwing darts at dart bird dart boards can predict the market as well as some of those really big fund managers that manage some of these big mutual funds that your four zero one k's go into.

And so his answer is to say that rather than putting in putting your money into these highly managed funds, you should go for some of those low fee index funds like Vanguard. Alright? So definitely check those out. And the reason again why I'm referring you to those books is because I'm not a financial adviser. I am just an idiot who has a podcast, and if you take any money advice from me, you're freaking insane.

But I recommend you check out those books. But for now, for our purposes, what you need to understand is that when everybody's running away from the market, when everybody's running away from the stock market, that is a prime time for those of us who are looking to buy stocks to buy stocks. Right? Why? Because stocks are basically being sold at a discount right now.

They're being sold at a discount. And so it's a great time to get into a total market index fund if you've been waiting to invest and you've been waiting to do something with your retirement account. So think about that. Read those books before you do anything. Talk to somebody who is knowledgeable, way more knowledgeable than I am.

You can go to Vanguard Funds. I'll put the link up on my, my show notes, and I have no relationship with them. They're a nonprofit organization, and you can talk to them about investing your money if you want some advice there. Alright? The second big thing that I think you guys should start considering for this time.

While you might be hunkered down in your house, you're not gonna be able to watch sports, the world seems a little bit more boring right now unless you're just sitting there watching the news, watching everybody freak out. But what you could do to get ahead while everybody else is freaking out is do more reading. Now I just went over three books that you could start reading, but I want to tell you a little story. A lot of you know that I got really sick over the last six months. I have ulcerative colitis and that disease has nearly killed me a bunch of times.

For the past six months that was one of those times. I lost over 40 pounds, I was down to close to one hundred and fifty pounds, almost got under that. And I was extremely weak and really couldn't do much in terms of work. I still recorded this show because I feel like I have an obligation to put this show out there. But as far as training clients and doing some of the other things that I do for business to actually make money, well, I couldn't do a lot of that stuff.

So what I did instead was read. I started reading a bunch of books. I read probably 30 books over the last six months. And the thing is this no, wasn't making any money and that put me into really bad financial straits. But what I was able to do was a few things.

Number one, it put my situation into perspective. Because I was reading about Lincoln, who was, in my opinion, a human being who dealt with extreme more stress than I think anybody's ever dealt with in the history of the world, while he was dealing with the civil war. It got me to read more of Marcus Aurelius, another person as emperor of the Roman Empire, was dealing with worries that you and I couldn't comprehend, but still managed to see life in the grand scheme of things, through his writing of Meditations. It got me to read Montaigne, Michel de Montaigne, and that was a man who dealt with extreme grief throughout his life. It got me to read about Teddy Roosevelt, who went through extreme loss, was a widower at a very early age, and couldn't deal with the grief, but then turned his life around after that.

It got me to read about Xenophon and the Persian expedition, and how the Greeks found themselves in a foreign land surrounded by enemies, and then came up with a strategy to get themselves out of it. The reason why I'm telling you about all these is because number one it does, it allows you to put things in perspective. It gets you to see your life in perspective. The other thing it does is it teaches you about human beings. And when you read about human beings, it doesn't matter if it was two thousand years ago, fifty years ago, ten years ago, or right now.

The times change, but human psychology doesn't. When I was reading about Xenophon, was reading about their superstitions, how the Greeks almost allowed their fears to get the best of them. When I was reading about John D Rockefeller, I read about how irrational fears led to ups and downs in the oil market and how he was able to take advantage of those. When I was reading about Lincoln in in Battle Cry of Freedom, I got to see how crazy things were for this country at that time. And when you learn about human beings, you learn that people are going to freak out.

You learn that the media is gonna try to freak people out. Why? Because that's what the media does, and that's what we frankly do as human beings. We get an evolutionary benefit by alerting people to potential dangers, and that's how our brains work. But the reality is that what we do is we create mental prisons for ourselves.

Now I'm not telling you to go to an airport and interact with everybody and not wash your hands. I'm not telling you to go to Wuhan, China. But what I am telling you is this, don't allow this situation to keep you from enjoying your life and to keep you from pushing forward. We all need to take a chill pill. We need to open our eyes to the opportunities we have in front of us.

When we let fear dictate us, when we let fear dictate our actions, when we let fear dictate our decisions, when we let fear cause us to act like sheep, well, that's essentially what puts us in the greatest danger. Those people who are flocking to stores right now to buy up toilet paper, essentially what they're doing is just exposing themselves to greater chances of getting the coronavirus. Right? Because they're in close quarters with other human beings. And that's what I mean by irrationality causing us to be sheep and causing us to do things that aren't gonna put us in an advantageous position.

All those people fleeing the stock market right now, all they're doing is locking in their losses And frankly ruining their chances of being able to be involved in the recovery. And there will be a recovery. Well again I'm not a financial expert but there's no rational reason for the stock market to be down. Right? And because of that, like I said, it's a great time to buy stocks.

But there's one last final thing I want to talk to you about here and it's one more thing that you can do to get ahead during this time period. If you're off from work, it's a great time to take a deep breath, go outside, enjoy the sun, maybe meditate a little bit, maybe get a workout in. I know a lot of you probably don't want to go to the gym because gyms are probably one of the most germ infested places on the planet. Right? I used to be a gym owner.

I know those dumbbell handles never get cleaned. I know that there's a lot of people who go out of the bathroom without washing their hands. You know who you are nasty. But it's a great time to maybe get outside. Go for a run.

Go for a walk. Maybe go to a calisthenics park. Do some pull ups, do some push ups. And if you want to go to the gym, go to the gym. Just make sure you're washing your hands and using hand sanitizer.

Right? And don't touch your freaking face nasty. Right? So, you know, use this time. Use this time to get healthier.

Use this time to get your mind right. While the world is losing its mind, come back to your to your true self, and be the person that you're supposed to be during this time of supposed crisis. That's all I got for you today, guys. I hope all this made sense to you. If it doesn't, if you got questions for me, just bring them up to me.

You can reach out to me anytime at chris@warriorsoulagoge.com, or you can reach out to me on Instagram. My Instagram account is at warrior soul agoge, that's a g o g e, or you can hit me up on Twitter. My Twitter handle is at warrior soul gear, g e a r, or you can go to Facebook and hit me up there. Whatever you decide to do, I'm always happy to talk with you. And I hope you guys are enjoying these episodes.

We've been doing phenomenally in 2020. Really, we are three times the amount of downloads that we had last year month to month. And this thing is growing, and that means that you guys are spreading the word. You guys are talking about these shows. You're sharing these episodes out with people.

You're talking about the podcast, And I have to humbly ask you to keep spreading the word because that's the only way that we're gonna get this information out to more veterans. And the deal is this. I don't care if you ever spend a dime with Warrior Soul. I don't care if you buy a t shirt. I don't care if you buy one of my training programs.

I don't I'm not asking you for donations. All I want you guys to do is spread the word. And you do that by the things I just said, or you can pay me the highest compliment in the world and head over to iTunes and write me a written rating and review. That helps so much to spread word about the show, helps us to show up more on more searches, and it helps to get this information in the ears of more veterans. If you wanna support the podcast in other ways, we've got some great clothing up at www.warriorsoul.shop.

Great t shirts, great skivvy shirts, great graphic t shirts. And we also have the Warrior Soul Academy. That's about warriorsoul.academy. That's where you can get some of my training programs, get some of my courses. We got courses on fitness, courses on business that you can take advantage of.

And then finally, if you wanna support yourself, join us in the Warrior's Obituary Society. That's a group of us that get together each week on live calls, and we're empowering each other to live absolutely epic lives. We're the epic obituaries. And in the Warrior's Obituary Society, every new member goes through an eight week development program. That's where we're getting you really clear on your vision.

We're helping you to customize your fitness plan. We're helping you to customize your own personal finance plans. We are helping you to get very clear on your career and your business goals, and we're pushing you toward them each and every week. We do live calls each week. We have our own private chat forum, and I've kept the price really low on this.

So if you guys are interested in that, head over to www.warriorobituarysociety.com. That's warriorobituarysociety.com. My name is Chris Albert. This is the Warrior Soul podcast. I wanna thank you so much for listening.

Be healthy, but above all, love life. I'll be talking to you guys soon. Get out there and live your best life while you can, and I am out.